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December 25, 2012

Sri Aurobindo's allegiance to Western ideal

The question remains
whether religion is really capable of identifying itself with spirituality. In
1918, when he wrote the passages I have quoted, Sri Aurobindo seemed to think
that it was possible; but later in his life he became less confident that traditional
religion had a significant role to play in the development of integral
spirituality. This conclusion came at the end of a long engagement with
religion that began in England,
took a new turn in Baroda and again in Calcutta, and reached an ambiguous conclusion in Pondicherry. I intend to
trace the course of this engagement, but, before I begin, I would like to spell
out for you the point of view from which I speak.

I am not, and never have
been a religious person. My parents were Protestant Christians, though neither
was religious. I was sent to Sunday school in order to satisfy my grandmother,
but took no interest at all in what was taught there, and never entered a
church or any other place of worship as a worshipper. If I ever stepped into a
church (or synagogue or mosque or temple) it was to admire the architecture and
artworks, and perhaps also to enjoy the atmosphere of peace that sometimes
fills such places. But I found the beliefs and practices of every religion I
encountered to be pointless and uninteresting.

The search for truth was
important to me; but it never crossed my mind that religion could be any help
in this. Rather I turned to poetry, philosophy and psychological
experimentation in my search for enlightenment. These interests led me to yoga
and, because yoga usually is taught by people who come from the Hindu
tradition, I was exposed to the literature and some of the practices of the
Hindu religion. I found, and still find, the literature profound and
significant. As for the practices, I found them colourful and charming, though
certainly not the sort of thing I could incorporate into my life. Now you may well ask, why should I, a
non-Hindu, choose to speak about Sri Aurobindo and Hinduism? …

In brief, what I have found
is that Sri Aurobindo’s nationalism was not based on religious conviction, but
(as he himself put it) on “the inalienable right of the nation to
independence.” His references to the Gita, to Hindu mythology, to Vedantic and
Tantric philosophy were natural in one who drew inspiration from these sources,
and who knew that they were meaningful to his audience… Nevertheless, it is
certain that Sri Aurobindo considered Hinduism and other religions to belong to
the world’s past, and he had no desire to perpetuate them.

... and speaks of their successes and failures
like one of the family. Fervent individualism and nationalism are key elements
in his character as they are typically with Romantics. For these many reasons,
his world-affirmativism should be considered to be born out of
an allegiance to a Western ideal more than to any that is Indian,
although it is predominantly expressed through the Indian concepts of Vedanta
and Tantra.

Indian
literature - Volume 15 - Page 104 Prema Nandakumar Sahitya
Akademi - 1972 - Himself a scholar, he enthuses us to take to a life of scholarship. Having
renounced his princely position in the BarodaCollege
for the sake of Mother India, he makes our hearts glow with love for the
Motherland. Regeneration is literally rebirth, ...

Sri
Aurobindo was never a recluse. You know, I have always defended this
view-point. Many people have said: “Oh, here is a man who has chickened out in
the phase of action, who has already moved away and who stayed at Pondicherry in the French
resort.” They said that he did not want to step out in the British eye because
he was afraid of action. But I also wrote a little bit in Sri
Aurobindo’s Action and there I have tried to bring together this
attitude of action and inaction and the kind of withdrawal that Sri Aurobindo
did. So Sri Aurobindo was somebody who was all the time exposed to the multiple
elements around him at many places. He was open to that. He always liked to
look at what was happening outside. And Shraddhavan has been able to pick up
the element of the quality of language, the tonal variation and the subtle
nuances of the English language which Sri Aurobindo carried with him as a
remnant of his European learning. And that is something which she has been able
to link with the spiritual quality of the language. I have read many other
scholars trying to expound the quality of spiritual resonance in Sri
Aurobindo’s poetry but Shraddhavan’s shraddha has been
unwavering and steady. And I don’t think there is any other person who deserves
this award in the present other than these two people.

These
contrasting passages address two different aspects of human life: (a)
Individuals who wish to evolve spiritually must undoubtedly forsake the
anarchic popular music as the Mother points out in the first passage.

(b)
Then there is the civilization at large which gets stuck in orthodox ways from
time to time. Music needs to be rewritten from time to time to inspire people
and subvert convention, as the Mother appreciates in the second passage.
Civilization continuously oscillates between mental rigidity and free-flowing
vitality, as Sri Aurobindo points out in the chapter on “Aesthetic and Ethical
Culture” in the The Human Cycle (CWSA vol 25, pp 92-101)